Top 98 Ethics And Moral Quotes
#1. The self respect of individuals ought to make them demand of their leaders conformity with an agreed-upon code of ethics and moral conduct.
Mary Barnett Gilson
#2. We don't usually think of what we eat as a matter of ethics. Stealing, lying, hurting people - these acts are obviously relevant to our moral character. In ancient Greece and Rome, ethical choices about food were considered at least as significant as ethical choices about sex.
Peter Singer
#3. There are people dying from famine on the roads, and you do not issue the stores of your granaries for them. When people die, you say, 'it is not owing to me, it is owing to the year.' In what does this differ from stabbing a man and killing him, and then saying, 'it was not I, it was the weapon?
Mencius
#4. The greatest ethical test that we're ever going to face is the treatment of those who are at our mercy.
Lyn White
#5. We are not quite sure that the Sermon on the Mount is the Sermon for the mart. We are not
sure, and an unsure place is an unsafe place*
We must go on or go back. We must be more
Christian or less.
E. Stanley Jones
#6. In the simple moral maxim the Marine Corps teaches
- do the right thing, for the right reason
- no exception exists that says: unless there's criticism or risk. Damn the consequences.
Josh Rushing
#7. If ethics is not the engine of success, in the train of growth, it sure is a guard, with a flag, which may be green, or at times red
Priyavrat Thareja
#8. Thus we find that the unconditioned condition of the goodness of anything is rational nature...To play this role, however, rational nature must itself be something of unconditional value--and end in itself.
Christine M. Korsgaard
#9. The moral sense enables one to perceive morality, and avoid it. The immoral sense enables one to perceive immorality and enjoy it.
Mark Twain
#10. In a city where men are killing each other like animals just to make it a happier place, who has the right to stop me from killing myself?
Orhan Pamuk
#11. Bobbing and weaving are methods and maneuvers by which we bend ethics, water down morals, and parse down values to serve our agendas.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#12. Virtue is not merely a state in conformity with the right principle, but one that implies the right principle; and the right principle in moral conduct is prudence.
Aristotle.
#13. One of the first steps toward an integral postmodernity is the development and establishment of a genuine environmental ethics, or a moral and ethical stance to nonhuman holons.
Ken Wilber
#14. If 10 percent of the population were to take a consciously ethical outlook on life and act accordingly, the resulting change would be more significant than any change of government,
Peter Singer
#16. Egoism holds, therefore, is that each man's happiness is the sole good--that a number of different things are each of them the only good thing there is--an absolute contradiction! No more complete and thorough refutation of any theory could be desired.
G.E. Moore
#17. Alasdair MacIntyre is one of the world's most influential living moral philosophers. He has written 30 books on ethics and held a variety of professorial chairs over the past four decades in North America.
John Cornwell
#18. At the bitter end of an era of liberation - women's lib, kids' lib, animal lib, and everything-but-ethics lib - America has apparently been liberated from its moral foundations. But for too many, the good life has become a living hell.
Billy Graham
#19. If a work of art is rich and vital and complete, those who have artistic instincts will see its beauty, and those to whom ethics appeal more strongly than aesthetics will see its moral lesson. It will fill the cowardly with terror, and the unclean will see in it their own shame.
Oscar Wilde
#20. Convinced as I am and as I am from my government that the world needs a new moral architecture over all I believe that this should be the first topic to debate in our world of today, ethics, moral.
Hugo Chavez
#21. ...The happy Warrior... is he... who, with a natural instinct to discern what knowledge can perform, is diligent to learn; abides by this resolve, and stops not there, but makes his moral being his prime care.
William Wordsworth
#23. I care not for the body which may rot. Yet, for the transgression of the spirit, of moral ethics, of life, liberty and the soul itself, I must and shall cross the line of battle or lose the very reason not to.
The Great Pacifist
#24. Here's the thing about politics: It's not an expression of your moral purity and your ethics and your probity and your fond dreams of some utopian future. Progressive people constantly fail to get this.
Tony Kushner
#25. If we shrug our shoulders at the avoidable suffering of the weak and the poor, of those who are getting exploited and ripped off, we are not the left.
Peter Singer
#26. True morals are a priceless thing that possesses the highest value and can never be bought or sold at any cost.
Abigail Landsbrook
#27. If justice perishes, then it is no longer worthwhile for men to live upon the earth.
Immanuel Kant
#28. Even the most rational approach to ethics is defenseless if there isn't the will to do what is right.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#29. Even a purely moral act that has no hope of any immediate and visible political effect can gradually and indirectly, over time, gain in political significance.
Vaclav Havel
#30. We must not, therefore, be frightened by the assertion that a thing is natural into the admission that it is good; good does not, by definition, mean anything that is natural; and it is therefore always an open question whether anything that is natural is good.
G.E. Moore
#31. The moral is that the shape of a society must depend on the ethical nature of the individual and not on any political system however apparently logical or respectable.
William Golding
#32. Freemasonry embraces the highest moral laws and will bear the test of
any system of ethics or philosophy ever promulgated for the uplift of man.
Douglas MacArthur
#34. Men, in so far as they live in obedience to reason necessarily do only such things as are necessarily good for human nature, and consequently for each individual man.
Baruch Spinoza
#35. Our country, our people, and our laws have to be our top priority.
Donald J. Trump
#36. I take no pleasure in seeing DeLay swing gently in the wind. But the thing I believe in the most is ethics. If someone has lost his moral compass and has to go to jail to find it, then I believe it will make him a much better person.
Tom DeLay
#37. Epicurus as a moral empiricist felt that our immediate feelings are far more cogent and authoritative guides to the good life than abstract maxims, verbal indoctrination, or even the voice of reason itself. Hence he based his ethics on nature, not on convention or on reason.
Epicurus
#38. By wearing cosmetics a woman seeks to look younger or more beautiful than she otherwise would. Honesty doesn't require that she issue a continuous disclaimer: I see you are looking at my face. Please be aware that I don't look this good first thing in the morning.
Sam Harris
#39. As you say of yourself, I too am an Epicurean. I consider the genuine (not the imputed) doctrines of Epicurus as containing everything rational in moral philosophy which Greece and Rome have left us.
[Letter to William Short, 31 October 1819]
Thomas Jefferson
#40. Through our scientific and technological genius we've made of this world a neighborhood. And now through our moral and ethical commitment we must make of it a brotherhood. We must all learn to live together as brothers - or we will all perish together as fools.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#41. Science tries to record and explain the factual character of the natural world, whereas religion struggles with spiritual and ethical questions about the meaning and proper conduct of our lives. The facts of nature simply cannot dictate correct moral behavior or spiritual meaning.
Stephen Jay Gould
#42. If you witness evil men committing evil deeds and do nothing, what does that make you?
K.L. Toth
#43. What's the point of having beliefs and values if we don't stand up for the former and live by the latter?
Colleen Patrick-Goudreau
#44. The difficulty was not that of following a moral principle at personal cost; the difficulty was that of knowing what to do when there is more than one principal, and when the principles clash.
Elton Trueblood
#45. Inexperienced in the course of world affairs and incapable of being prepared for all the chances that happen in it, I ask myself only 'Can you also will that your maxim should become a universal law?' Where you cannot it is to be rejected...
Immanuel Kant
#46. It isn't the evil and indecent who are flung down into the depths, no! Oh, no! The evil and decisive fling down those who are moral, honest and noble but maladroit, hesitant and full of scruples.
Andrzej Sapkowski
#47. So, at any rate, it appears. But appearance is not reality.
Gordon Graham
#48. I am not a wishing well with legs.
(Paraphrasing Babylon 5's Londo Mollari, repeately, when asked to perform hacking functions for strangers.)
Adrian Lamo
#49. Allan Bloom, in his book The Closing oftheAmerican Mind, chronicled the epidemic rise of moral relativism that reduces ethics to personal preferences rather than to objective norms for what is right and wrong.
R.C. Sproul
#50. A philosopher is someone who promotes moral excellence, argues for moral excellence, and gets other people to behave morally and excellently based on those arguments.
Stefan Molyneux
#51. Satan mostly employs comparatively moral instruments and the language of ethics to give his aims an air of respectability.
Mahatma Gandhi
#52. If indeed good were a feeling....then it would exist in time. But that is why to call it so is to commit the naturalistic fallacy. It will always remain pertinent to ask, whether the feeling itself is good; and if do, then good cannot itself be identical with any feeling.
G.E. Moore
#53. The Sermon on the Mount seems dangerous. It challenges the whole underlying conception on which modern society is built. It would replace it by a new conception, animate it with a new motive, and turn it toward a new goal.
E. Stanley Jones
#54. Divine permission, given to people who think they have god on their side, enables actions that a morally normal unbeliever would not contemplate.
Christopher Hitchens
#55. It is as if a Mohammedan, while recognizing the divine mission of the Arab prophet, were to write for his son a treatise on the ethics of the New Testament as better adapted than the moral system of the Koran for the training and confirming of a young man in the practice of virtue.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#56. I charge my clients for my time and expertise, my heart is free.
Saurabh Gupta
#57. Since when do grown men and women, who presume to hold high government office and exercise what they think of as "moral leadership," require ethics officers to tell them whether it is or isn't permissible to grab the secretary's behind or redirect public funds to their own personal advantage?
Meg Greenfield
#58. Without man and his potential for moral progress, the whole of reality would be a mere wilderness, a thing in vain, and have no final purpose.
Immanuel Kant
#59. Long regarded as central to the contemporary understanding of medical ethics are four principles that must be satisfied in order to fulfill the requirements of moral decision-making. These principles are autonomy, justice, beneficence, and non-maleficence.
Sherwin B. Nuland
#61. Science, as long as it limits itself to the descriptive study of the laws of nature, has no moral or ethical quality and this applies to the physical as well as the biological sciences.
Ernst Boris Chain
#62. But for all its benefits in offering moral guidance and meaning in life, in today's secular world religion alone is no longer adequate as a basis for ethics.
Dalai Lama XIV
#64. It is not enough to be nice; you have to be good. We are attracted by nice people; but only on the assumption that their niceness is a sign of goodness.
Roger Scruton
#65. [ ... ] God's message is that we are largely on our own. We are the ones who give moral guidelines body and life. You can take, if you will, your solace in heaven, but you must work out your ethics on earth.
Susan Neiman
#66. Science enables humans to satisfy their needs. It does nothing to change them. They are no different today from what they have always been. There is progress in knowledge, but not in ethics. This s the verdict both of science and history, and the view of every one of the world's religions.
John Gray
#67. Our ethics and systems of justice, our entire moral order, are founded on the notion of society as a collective of individual selves-- autonomous, introspective, accountable agents. If this self-reflective, moral agent is revealed to be illusory, what then?
Paul Broks
#68. What if our better nature wasn't better after all? But was instead, well, just nature?
Kevin Dutton
#69. Dangerous consequences will follow when politicians and rulers forget moral principles. Whether we believe in God or karma, ethics is the foundation of every religion.
Dalai Lama XIV
#71. The ethics of peace is liberal; it's not conservative based.
Henry Johnson Jr
#72. Work hard, do your best, live the truth, trust yourself, have some fun ... and you'll have no regrets.
Byrd Baggett
#73. There are a lot of people who pretend to have moral ethics and they talk from both sides of their mouth.
John Assaraf
#74. Leadership responsibility is multidimensional and cannot be described in one or two words. It is personal, interpersonal, environmental and societal.
Linda Fisher Thornton
#75. A historical property has morals and ethics of the society that created it and it can be revived. What I mean is that we can discover new possibilities from the process of dismantling, transforming, and recreating.
Ai Weiwei
#76. An ethical idealist, a person whom embraces the honorable philosophy of ethical idealism, performs acts that are honest, pure, and righteous regardless of their fearfulness.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#77. Morality does not come to this mortal world from some imaginary paradise. It rises from the neurons of mortal humans.
Abhijit Naskar
#78. We wanted a labour force, but human beings came.
Terry Hayes
#79. Especially when it comes to animals used for food, humanity's reasoning power and concern about fairness plummets.
Karen Davis
#80. The justice of any single commandment cannot be proven logically in an irrefutable manner, and there is no moral law which is binding under all conditions without exception. Ethics, generally, exist only as far as we are willing to accept them.
(from 'The Specter of Alexander Wolf')
Gaito Gazdanov
#81. State a moral case to a plowman and a professor. The former will decide it as well, and often better than the latter, because he has not been led astray by artificial rules.
Thomas Jefferson
#82. Masonry is first and foremost an education society, one which TEACHES moral and ethics - a way of life. Secondly,
Cliff Porter
#83. There is no moral absolute, and this leads us to situational ethics, which unfortunately is being taught in public schools all over America. This means that right and wrong is dependent upon the circumstances.
Ted Cruz
#84. When a hunter is in a tree stand with high moral values and with the proper hunting ethics and richer for the experience, that hunter is 20 feet closer to God.
Fred Bear
#85. All ethics and morals are culturally relative. And Esme's reaction taught me that while cultural relativism is an easy concept to process intellectually, it is not, for many, an easy one to remember.
Hanya Yanagihara
#86. Since when did the community become our moral compass - our viability and ethics as writers determined so much by our team spirit? ... What if all this communing actually hurts the primary means by which I set out to participate and communicate - my writing itself?
Meghan Tifft
#87. If truth and moral values are relative, one cannot claim that certain human rights are universally applicable to all cultures and all people.
Stephen McAndrew
#88. I will call no being good who is not what I mean when I apply that epithet to my fellow creatures; and if such a creature can sentence me to hell for not so calling him, to hell I will go .
John Stuart Mill
#89. If a problem is irreversible, is there still an ethical obligation to try to reverse it?
Chuck Klosterman
#90. Do not perform an action for the reward it may bring. Perform it because it is right; it is dharma.
Shelley Schanfield
#91. ... if geometry were as much opposed to our passions and present interests as is ethics, we should contest it and violate I but little less, notwithstanding all the demonstrations of Euclid and Archimedes ...
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
#92. Oh, you humans may prefer empathy and mercy, but that's like intuiting the answer to an equation: you still have to go back and work the problem to be certain you were right. We can come to genuinely moral conclusions by our own paths.
Rachel Hartman
#93. For women especially, virginity has become the easy answer- the morality quick fix. You can be vapid, stupid, and unethical, but so long as you've never had sex, you're a "good" (i.e. "moral) girl and therefore worthy of praise.
Jessica Valenti
#94. Now here is a departure from the first principle of true ethics. Here we find ideas of moral wrong and moral right associated with something else than beneficial action. The consequent is, we lose sight of the real basis of morals, and substitute a false one.
Frances Wright
#95. You cannot have a boundary-less existence, because your neighbor has his own boundaries, and who is going to give you the ethics between the two boundaries? If there is no objective moral law, relativism will take hold, and relativism ultimately will lead to self-destruction.
Ravi Zacharias
#96. What do you have that you did not receive? And if you did receive it, why do you boast as if you had not received it?
Various
#97. I am quite incapable of understanding how any work of art can be criticized from a moral standpoint. The sphere of art and the sphere of ethics are absolutely distinct and separate.
Oscar Wilde
#98. In silence, an act is an act is an act. Verbalized and discussed, it becomes an ethical problem ...
Aldous Huxley
